All At Sea – The Ghost Ship Team Challenge

The longer they play, the more they lose. Ace Rothstein’s mantra in the film “Casino” was never far from my mind as my FPL team stumbled and shanked its way towards half-a-millionth in the world last season.

Every bright idea and cunning plan merely deepened my decline, and for a proud man it felt like the end. I’ve never claimed be anything special as a Fantasy Premier League player, but I’d become accustomed to the notion that my years of consistency around the 10k mark entitled me to a mediocre suburban respectability in conversations about Fantasy Football. How could I show my face at the school gate now?

I reassured myself that I’d played it by the book: I’d gone cheap at the back in a 3-4-3, played the fixtures, jumped on the bandwagons, looked in bemused incomprehension at Doosra’s long sequences of three-digit numbers.

Yet try as I might, transfer after transfer had backfired in my face with cold Teutonic efficiency – buy Hazard, sell Hazard, buy Hazard, sell Hazard, somehow end up with Ryan Fraser.

It’s human nature to attribute one’s successes to merit and one’s failures to fortune but I couldn’t persuade myself that this was just bad luck, I had to face the fact that I might just not be very good at FPL – and it hurt.

My wife showed me the way forward with her customary bedside manner “oh for god’s sake either lighten up or just stop playing it”.

Lightening up was out of the question, but stop playing it? The idea felt strangely exhillerating: no more emotional conflicts of interest, no more West Brom highlights – I could just be a normal football fan for a change? I resolved to give it a try for a season.

The Challenge

The FPL launch came and went without a wobble, but as the charity shield approached I started clucking for just one more taste. I struck upon a compromise: playing, but not playing in the traditional sense.

In 2016/17 every decision seemed to make my position a little bit worse – the more I played, the more I lost. This season my whole strategy would be to make as few decisions as humanly possible, to set sail upon a purpose-built ghost ship.

No transfers, no rotation, no adjustments to my captaincy or sub order – total nautical negligence.

To add spice to the experiment I imposed a penalty for success – that if I beat my overall rank from last year using this strategy I will retire from FPL permanently.

Developing a comprehensive framework of ground rules for the experiment proved prohibitively difficult and dull.

Suffice to say I’m going to try to make no transfers at all (as Wilfried Zaha’s continued presence in my starting lineup will attest) but accepting that exceptional circumstances may emerge (e.g. season-ending injury or transfer) in which I might, I’m not going to use either wildcard and I intend to use my bench boost and triple captaincy chips on the standard late-season double-gameweeks.

Selection Strategy

The selection strategy was fairly straightforward – pick an eleven that should score well over a full season and have a half-reasonable bench to cover for absences. Below is my motley ghost ship crew.

I felt the player list offered long-term value in premium defenders, some of the mid-priced mids, and a simple Kane (c) and Lukaku (vc) duopoly up front. Knowing I would never change my captaincy made me feel more comfortably sticking to just two premium attackers and spreading the cash around the squad.

I was prepared to accept a degree of rotation risk with my premium fullbacks (in the hope that the potential for late-game bench blocking won’t be as great as it would be with more attacking players), but new arrivals to the Premier League were avoided entirely for safety’s sake.

Results So Far

The early results? So far, so Rod Stewart, with a 26k overall rank and comfortably top of the Mods and Contributors league (when I join it this week, having established that I’d be winning). I know it’s not going to last, but it’s nice to have something to talk about at the school gate again.

The All At Sea- Ghost Ship Stilicho can be found here.